Defending Charlottesville from White Supremacy, with Lisa Woolfork

The eyes of the country turned to Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend when a so-called “Unite the Right” rally turned deadly when a white nationalist plowed his car into a crowd of people, injuring 19 and killing Heather Heyer, 32, an activist and counter-protester. But organizers in Charlottesville have been fighting white nationalism for a while. Lisa Woolfork of Charlottesville Black Lives Matter shares some background on the community's response to its “summer of hate,” connects the dots between the fights over Confederate monuments to violent white supremacy, and tells us about what she saw on the ground.

Outtake:

“As well as seeing the Nazis and the “alt-right” retreat from Emancipation Park after their event was declared an unlawful assembly. That was quite a parade of hate. As they were leaving the area, they threw flares, they spit on people. There were several altercations of shouting matches and shoving matches. But still, it was a very powerful display of how love conquers hate. To stand there shoulder to shoulder to shoulder with neighbors, with colleagues from my department in English, with other faculty from around the university that I have seen a few of, from people in my own organization representing Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, which is a very small and new group, has since developed allied connections.

These were all examples of how the community wants to stand together against the threat and the promise of racist violence. Something that I thought was, again, very heartening, was that too often people want to believe that symbolic hatred and symbolic racism has no real world consequence, that if we are to maintain symbols of white supremacy, those are completely devoid from the practices of white supremacy. That is false.

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What does it mean that someone’s personal identity is bound up in a racist confederate monument, a monument to white supremacy? For me, the argument about re-contextualization has already been made. I think the best and most honest context for these monuments is white supremacy. Nothing says what these monuments really mean like a thousand white supremacists coming to defend them.

Interviews for Resistance is a syndicated series of interviews with organizers, agitators and troublemakers, available twice weekly as text and podcast.